In conversation with RFi Australian Retail Banker

June 2, 2016 | RFi Australian Retail Banker

“For three decades, we’ve been helping the world’s most innovative banks and financial services firms serve their customers better by using advanced technologies. Powered by FinnOne – which has won the award for the world’s best-selling lending solution 10 times and FinnAxia, our integrated transaction banking solution, 150,000 people in 50 countries manage more than 26 million transactions every day,” says Vishnu R. Dusad, Managing Director & CEO, Nucleus Software.

Vishnu R. Dusad in conversation with RFi Australian Retail Banker

- What are the key opportunities and challenges Nucleus Software sees for traditional financial services providers over the next 12 months?

With all the hype around FinTech, people tend to forget that financial services firms are essentially powered by technology. The challenge, in the recent past, has been the inability of technology to keep up with customer demands. New technologies are driving change and many traditional players now face the choice of either being disintermediated or proactively disrupting their own business models to thrive in the future.

Looking at the FinTech’s first, they are unencumbered by legacy infrastructures, not restricted by complex regulations and not limited by high cost bases. Powered by sophisticated new technologies, these new players are using agile business models to capitalise on rapidly changing customer needs. As reported by KPMG, financing for FinTech has jumped 6 fold in the last 3 years, reaching US$20 billion in 2015. In December 2015, Australian FinTech startups, which represented 5% of the overall startup landscape, managed to attract more than 14% of $1bn invested in FinTech globally. So clearly, addressing the FinTech threat is a key focus for traditional financial services providers.

Secondly, millennials are presenting a new set of challenges. Many are mistrustful of ‘big business’ and disillusioned by the established players. When they are actively seeking financial services, they are looking for something new. They are comfortable with FinTech offerings and this is driving innovations such as contactless and P2P payments. Contactless payments via mobile were estimated at AUD$3 billion in Australia last year, according to Westpac. Mobile-based contactless payments accounted for 60% of all debit card transactions in 2014. The companies that address the needs of millennials best will be big winners.

Thirdly, blockchain technology is challenging the need for trusted, central repositories and reliable intermediaries. Blockchain has the potential to make trading processes more efficient, improve regulatory control, eliminate the intermediaries, reduce the cost of transactions, and eliminate errors and reconciliation. Above all, it has the capability to disrupt existing business models. How this is going to play out is far from clear, but the need to address the blockchain challenge is clear.

With all this talk of challenges, it is really important to realise that traditional financial services providers have immense advantages, which if used wisely can help them capture immense opportunities.

- What are the key strategic goals for Nucleus Software over the next 12 months? What kinds of strategies are you undertaking to capture market and consumer attention of your offerings and proposition?

For three decades, we’ve been helping the world’s most innovative banks and financial services firms serve their customers better by using advanced technologies. Powered by FinnOne – which has won the award for the world’s best-selling lending solution 10 times and FinnAxia, our integrated transaction banking solution, 150,000 people in 50 countries manage more than 26 million transactions every day. Our key mission continues to be to help these customers, and others, take advantage of the opportunities that are created by rapidly changing market conditions.

From a geographic expansion perspective, we are continuing to focus on a small number of strategic markets – and Australia is at the top of that list. As banks in Australia are also transforming their systems to become lean, agile and adaptive to new technologies, this provides us with a great opportunity to show the banks how we can help them achieve their business goals. We will continue to develop and launch new solutions, for example making FinnOne Neo available in the cloud, continuing to enhance our lending analytics solution and introducing new mobility offerings to help bring digitisation and customer centricity in lending to the Australian market.

We know that we can only be successful if our customers are successful, and so our key strategic goal is constant – focus on delivering what our customers need.